Best Custom Reporting Software Tools

JReport by Logi Analytics (now discontinued) empowered companies to perform data analysis and generate reports directly from other business applications. It was scalable, customizable, fault-tolerant and worked seamlessly within other web interfaces. It integrated with any architecture and supported a range of embedding methods from the front and back ends.

Tableau is a data visualization and analytics solution that assists enterprises in making data-driven business decisions. It blends information from a wide range of sources to deliver actionable, real-time insights. It allows exploration of data via intuitive means such as drag-and-drop filtering and natural language queries, irrespective of skill levels. With ample customization and security options, it offers control over data visualization, enabling creation of dashboards and stories that effectively convey business narratives. It can be purchased as part of the Tableau Creator package, which includes the desktop version, Prep and a Creator license of the server or online version.

Microsoft Power BI is an analytics tool that assists in reporting, data mining and data visualization to provide business insights. Through Power BI's simple interface, businesses can connect to a variety of data sources and create their own dashboards and reports. Originally born from Excel as an add-on, Power BI has since grown to stand on its own. At a relatively low cost, Power BI fulfills the needs of organizations ranging from small business owners to enterprise operators. There are three versions: Desktop, which is available for free for individual use, an upgraded Pro plan offered on a monthly price-per-user SaaS subscription and a capacity-based Premium plan which provides enterprise-level insights with on-premise deployment and a dedicated cloud infrastructure.

BusinessObjects from SAP offers a variety of packages to fit businesses of all industries and sizes. It aims to reduce the cost of IT upkeep and increase responsiveness to business problems. It streamlines workloads and lets users share insights to make better business decisions.

Domo is a cloud-based business management suite that accelerates digital transformation for businesses of all sizes. It performs both micro and macro-level analysis to provide teams with in-depth insight into their business metrics as well as solve problems smarter and faster. It presents these analyses in interactive visualizations to make patterns obvious to users, facilitating the discovery of actionable insights. Through shared key performance indicators, users can overcome team silos and work together across departments.

IBM Cognos Analytics is a self-service, web-based analytics platform which empowers users of all skill levels to explore data through reporting, data analytics, KPI monitoring, events and metrics. Reports give users the ability to not just visualize their insights, but also share them with colleagues. It integrates with Watson Analytics, which leverages IBM’s artificial intelligence and natural language processing to make insights more accessible to non-technical users. It has various components which give additional functionality, flexibility and agility when processing large sets of data.

It’s an open-source project on Eclipse and is an acronym for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools. It lets organizations extract and transform data for business analysis. Its Report Designer enables visual report-building within interactive dashboards. The runtime component executes the reports once ready. Embedded into a range of business interfaces, it enables custom design layout, data access and scripting to present report output over the web. It supports charts, crosstabs, using multiple data sources within the same report, re-using queries within reports and addition of custom code.

Oracle Reports is a component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite and offers businesses instant access to their data on all levels in a secure and scalable environment. The reports developer is a powerful WYSIWYG, or what-you-see-is-what-you-get, design tool that keeps report generation easy and intuitive.

The SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Service) platform from Microsoft allows users to create, share, deploy and manage reports for their business. The server-based system offers customization functions and lets users prepare and deliver various types of documents, both printed and interactive. This software can connect to SQL databases and utilize the Microsoft Visual Studio interface to explore and prepare data. It allows non-technical users access to report building and data exploration techniques that improve data literacy.

JasperReports, at its core, is an embeddable, open-source Java-based reporting tool that can write to a variety of destinations. It can generate dynamic content suitable for embedded analytics. It includes the JasperReports Library, which is a reporting engine, and the JasperReports Server that provides advanced server capabilities, such as report scheduling and permissions-based access.Integrating into the larger Jaspersoft suite, to cater to businesses with sophisticated requirements, it supports front-end data visualization and reporting through Jaspersoft Studio.

Integrate data from different platforms with the aid of connectors to facilitate robust analysis. Access real-time data to extract useful insights. Export data to multiple destinations for advanced analysis and visualization. Consolidating data at a centralized location ensures users gauge ROI across different marketing channels and campaigns. Understand KPIs with up-to-date dashboards and reports. Leverage standard rules to define naming conventions for dimensions and metrics.

SAP Crystal Reports is a feature-rich reporting tool that gleans business-critical insights through data exploration, visualization and custom reporting. Users drill-down to a high level of granularity to interact with and display data via visually rich reports and dashboards, enabling greater understanding of the metrics that count. Available as a SaaS model or hosted locally, it integrates with other SAP and third-party offerings, and third-party applications such as Microsoft Office to provide entry-level user access to data. Users leverage a universal semantic layer to query large data sets and to intuitively design ad-hoc and print-ready reports in a variety of export formats.

MicroStrategy is a data analytics platform that delivers actionable intelligence to organizations of all sizes. It allows users to customize data visualizations and build personalized real-time dashboards. It leverages data connectivity, machine learning and mobile access to offer users comprehensive control over their insights. Due to its ease of use and scalability, it stands out as a leader in the enterprise analytics field. Users can choose between cloud, on-premise or hybrid deployment according to their needs.

Microsoft Dynamics GP is a versatile solution, well-suited for companies seeking to connect supply chain workflows with tasks such as financial management and human resources management. It offers a range of features, with the option to add on integrations with third-party offerings or implement advanced packages to further increase its functionality. It helps free up employee time to focus on other tasks through its automation of processes such as the generation of receivables, the creation of purchase orders and the direct deposit of employee pay to bank accounts. Available on-premise or in the cloud.

InsightSquared is a sales analytics SaaS platform that builds a path for revenue operations professionals from sales data to sales intelligence, empowering them to make better decisions informed by insights. It helps businesses dig deep into their sales pipelines to thoroughly understand what drives results. With AI-powered forecasting, detailed reporting, complete sales funnel visibility and employee performance tracking, it enables enterprises to track their key metrics and sales growth with precision and strategize for the future with confidence.Suitable for companies of all sizes, it simplifies the sales process and helps businesses improve ROI and maximize their results. As each offering is customized to fit the client’s needs, pricing and functionality will vary based on the tier of plan and number of components selected.

GoodData is a powerful, embeddable, customizable SaaS solution that combines, analyzes and visualizes the internal and external data of an organization to help businesses change the way they make decisions, with a focus on data-driven best practices. It lets users process data, analyze trends and create visualizations that present information in an easily-digestible format. Users can interpret these visualizations to draw insights and make intelligent business decisions.

Formerly Host Analytics, Planful is a financial planning and analysis cloud platform. It accelerates end-to-end FP A. Suitable for midsize to large-scale businesses, it helps by centralizing data and managing financial and operational processes. It helps users plan and manage reviews, approvals and submissions and generates workflow status reports to check the performance of every department. It helps analyze asset performance by using financial budgeting and forecasting techniques with its capital planning feature. It is a scalable solution that allows companies to check the effect of projects on the overall bottom line.

WebFOCUS is a data analytics solution from Information Builders that helps businesses transform their data into actionable insights. Its intuitive interface makes self-service intelligence accessible to users of all skill levels. Its capabilities include dashboards, scorecards, mobile access, guided ad hoc reporting, data integrations, dynamic report distribution and much more. As of 2020, the vendor has announced that it will be acquired by TIBCO.

Jet Reports offers easy-to-use reporting services designed to integrate with ERP platforms, especially Microsoft Dynamics. It addresses data warehousing, reporting and analytics needs, allowing users of all data literacy levels to perform data exploration tasks to generate reports and glean insights from their data.

Infor Birst is a cloud-based analytics software tool that aims to help users discover insights without the need for analyst input. It unifies IT-managed enterprise data with user-owned data, supporting the blending of both in a top-down and bottom-up manner. It uses consistent business metrics to structure raw data into organized sets and visualizations. It helps users identify patterns and better understand their organization’s KPIs. It offers a seamless, integrated UI that allows users to perform every step of the data analysis process in a single interface, enabling a smooth experience. It can be deployed either from the cloud or self-hosted on-premise. Users can purchase it in three available formats: per-user fee, by department or business unit or by end-customer in embedded scenarios.

Logi Symphony (formerly Logi Analytics) provides businesses with interactive data analytics and visualizations, offering advanced reporting and visualization features in a minimal-code environment. It offers self-service data analysis and data discovery; then connects and blends operational intelligence to prepare it; and finally lets users turn it into dashboards, reports and other visualizations.

ActiveReports is a .NET reporting tool from GrapeCity that facilitates the creation of reports to display proprietary data in the form of documents or web-based formats. It is based on C# code and uses the Visual Studio interface, offering easy use by programmers. This reporting solution comes in a standard and professional edition and only operates on the Windows platform. It lets users export reports into a range of formats for collaboration and presentation.

ReportsNow is a JD Edwards reporting solution that helps in real-time reporting of proprietary data for analysis. Pulling data from and integrating with JDE as well as non-JDE sources, it provides a host of intuitive functions to help create a wide range of business reports, allowing for automated scheduling and downloading of these reports. Through advanced reporting via Data Access Studio, enterprises can create and edit any kind of data. Its mobile BI stack enables cloud connectivity, making reports available on any device.

Stimulsoft Reports is a suite of report and dashboard products in Java, PHP, .NET and other formats. It allows for enhanced development of multi-tier reports and interactive dashboards through an intuitive designer that can draw from internal and relational sources.It can be packaged or purchased individually depending on the user’s needs. It can be scaled through Stimulsoft Server to enable further functions like analytics and processing. It is deployable via the web or on Linux, Mac or Windows.

Panintelligence is a self-service, easy-to-use solution for company-wide reporting. It can display multiple data sources side by side, and the data shown is always live and up-to-date.It is easy to implement, cloud-based and offers multi-tenancy, load balancing, data mining and predictive analytics. Dashboards make it easy for anyone to visualize and communicate complex data in real time. It’s embeddable, highly customizable and reporting is streamlined. User activity can be restricted and audited, with role-based security.

I-net Clear Reports is a Java-based enterprise reporting solution. With its free template designer and access to a template repository, it streamlines the process of compiling data into a presentable form. It is compatible with anything that can run Java and can pull from any Java Database Connectivity data source. It can be embedded or executed stand-alone in a browser. It can export files in a variety of formats, including PDF, SVG, XML and JPEG.

Windward Studios offers an embeddable reporting/docgen tool built around designing templates in Microsoft Office. The combination of Office and Windward's tags make the reporting process quick and easy by removing the work of hand-coding reporting templates. It’s designed to produce beautiful reports in a number of different formats, including PDF, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, PPTX and more. After embedding the Windward .NET or Java engine, users can merge data with their templates to generate reports documents. This includes, but isn’t limited to, SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, MySql, PostgreSQL, XML, JSON, OData, and more. A template can use multiple datasources in a single template.

SlamData is an open source tool based on SQL that aims to make it easy for developers and non-developers to access MongoDB. This software is one of the fastest growing products in the NoSQL database space. This program brings high-quality source integration to the table, meaning that users can import from any source; no coding skills needed. This data can then be streamed to a variety of sources.

Upper Quadrant is an analytics and data science platform that facilitates marketing automation, campaign management, budgeting and forecasting. Used specifically by race organizers for event registrations, subscriber outreach and eCommerce, it aggregates and standardizes data from people, brands, geographical locations, business units and disparate systems. It enables data management and performance metrics tracking through real-time dashboards and shareable reports. Race organizers can share run metrics with customers through automated emails delivered straight to their inboxes.